Keeping count: Calorie app helps mom of 3 get toned

Lesley Young/Special to The Commercial Appeal
Nethdra Taylor-Fairey lost 30 pounds in four months once she discovered the Lose It! app, which kept her accountable for her daily calorie consumption and exercise. She has run a 5K and now hopes to train for a half-marathon.

Nethdra Taylor-Fairey was determined to lose the baby weight she gained after giving birth to her third child.

Watching what she ate and running three days a week weren’t doing the trick.

Last August, her cousin told her about the calorie counting app Lose It!, and when Taylor-Fairey learned it was free, she figured, “what could go wrong?”

“You can’t beat that,” said Taylor-Fairey, 33, a stay-at-home mom.

She finally found the last piece of the puzzle in her weight loss efforts.

“You enter your meals every day and the exercise you do every day,” she said. “Paying attention to my daily calories on top of the exercise, the weight just started falling off.”

Taylor-Fairey points to the accountability of entering her calories for every meal as the source of her success.

“If you’re just looking by eyesight at what you’re consuming, it doesn’t look like a lot, but once you really consider the calories, it really adds up,” she said.

The digital watchdog inspired the Bartlett woman to add more days of exercise to her weekly regimen.

She bumped up her workouts to five days a week for an hour a day as opposed to her previous 40-minutes, three-days-a-week running routine.

“I saw what I had been doing wasn’t working, so I thought I would increase my exercise to maximize my weight loss,” she said.

For the mother of two toddlers, fitting in a workout session proved to be a little problematic, but she didn’t let that prevent her from achieving her goals.

Taylor-Fairey just jumped on the treadmill at night once the little ones were in bed.

“I figured I’m worth it,” she said.

Within four months she had lost 30 pounds, achieving her initial goal of “just being healthy.”

“You want to be the best version of yourself, not only for yourself but for your family,” she said.

Along the way she picked up some new hobbies and some new goals.

“When I first started running, I had a hard time with endurance. I enrolled in a 5K just to see if I could do it,” she said. “I loved it.”

Next on her list is a half- marathon, and one day a full marathon.

“When you get into a groove and you achieve your exercise goals, it inspires you to give yourself more goals,” she said. “Once you start seeing the results in the mirror, once you see your clothes getting bigger, it makes you want to continue to achieve your goal.”

“Once I made up my mind I was going to be healthy, the sky was the limit.”

Have you lost weight and kept it off, adopted better eating habits, started exercising or had success living a more healthful lifestyle? E-mail your story to sunyata00@gmail.com.